Got
Ceramic?“If
you don’t bring something new to the party,
STAY HOME!” seems to be the new mantra when it
comes to audio wire. Recently, several
manufacturers of high-end audio cables have
moved away from traditional metal conductors
into a surprising variety of materials.
Products are now available in carbon fiber,
laser (via photon transducers and receivers),
and synthetic ceramic. Each technology brings
with it claims of superiority over metal
conductors. By corollary, each brings with it
a unique set of challenges.

A newcomer, Cerious Technologies is one
company subscribing to the philosophy of
“innovation instead of imitation.” They began
offering unique speaker and wire products on
June 1, 2005. “Clean-sheet” designs support
their corporate mission of bringing
innovative, high-performance products to the
consumer at affordable prices. Because
long-term performance is a high priority,
materials and construction are designed to
avoid the degradation over time they claim
occurs in standard wire cables. All Cerious
Technologies products contain “synthetic”
ceramic and are a combination of materials
each chosen for specific attributes. The
ceramic materials used are described as
“synthetic” because they are not made from
traditional methods or formulas. I recently
had the pleasure of reviewing their
ceramic-conductor digital interconnects, the
subject of this review.

Construction Methods and Materials
Cerious Technologies cables are not bulk
Taiwanese-built cables that are simply peeled
off of a roll, terminated, and then sold at a
ridiculous mark up. Each is hand-built to
length using a laborious process. The main
conductors are a composite micro-fiber
saturated with a liquid synthetic ceramic.
This conductor is inherently non-magnetic and
does not share characteristics normally
associated with metal-based conductors, such
as skin effects and absorption of RFI and EMF.
It is very low in mass, which affects its
mechanical energy storage properties.

To make one conductor, micro-fibers are cut to
length and twisted together to add stress
which lowers its ability to resonate. This
bundle is saturated with liquid synthetic
ceramic and pulled through a matching Teflon
tube that has been cut to the final finished
length. The Teflon tube is undersized to
provide compression to the conducting
elements. Next the conductor is cleaned and
the ends re-saturated and crimped in
ultra-pure copper collars. Adhesive-lined
shrink-wrap is added to seal the tubes and
provide strain relief for the connections.

Construction of the 14-gauge silver ground
wire is equally unique and labor intensive.
Bare silver would start to degrade immediately
so it is custom ordered with a triple jacket
of environmental barriers to keep it from
oxidizing. Immediately before production, the
barrier jacket is stripped to expose bare
wire. It is cut to length, hand wrapped with
micro-porous Teflon and submerged in Constant
Cleanse fluid to reach equilibrium. Constant
Cleanse is a formula developed by Cerious
Technologies to keep the silver conductor from
oxidizing. After about two days in the fluid
bath (the time varies by conductor size –
bigger gauges take longer) it is ready for
final assembly. A digital RCA cable contains
one fiber conductor and one silver ground
wire. A balanced version contains two fiber
conductors and one silver ground wire.

Final assembly begins with the conductors
being fed into the external striped jacket
(cut to length) and one end being terminated
with the connector and sealed. Next, liquid
ceramic damping fluid is flowed into the
external jacket. The liquid ceramic also
contains cleaner that continually bathes the
silver ground wire through its porous Teflon
wrap. The liquid ceramic is thinned to allow
it to flow better but it is still a slow
process. The assembly is hung to settle and
allow the thinning agent to rise to the
surface where it is poured off and discarded.
More fluid is added to fill the tube and the
whole process starts over until the cables are
full. The “pour” end is then sealed and the
final connector is terminated using highly
polished crimps to minimize reflections. After
crimping the contact is sealed to retard
aging. It is now one week later and the
one-meter interconnect is complete. Certainly
a far cry from hacking off a length of bulk
wire and terminating in less time than it will
take you to read this review.

Digital
vs. Analog Construction
Some manufacturers sell half of an analog pair
and call it digital but not Cerious
Technologies. As Robert Grost, Director of
Engineering of Cerious Technologies, explained
to me, digital requires much more precise
cable than analog, especially with regard to
ground and impedance. In analog you can kind
of “fudge it” with regard to impedance,
especially in tolerance across a cable. In
digital cables you want 75-ohms (or 110) at
all times through the cables. This requires
high tolerances. Secondly, digital is very
touchy with regard to ground, wanting to see
as little resistance as possible. That is why
large, pure silver conductors are used for
digital grounds. That causes all the problems
associated with metal wire. To retard
degradation over time, the Teflon jackets for
the grounds are permeable allowing penetration
of the cleaner-containing ceramic fluid. Mr.
Grost claims that because of this method the
silver will take about twenty years to start
breaking down and thus provides consistency of
product with the micro fiber based conductors
that do not age. Cerious Technologies analog
interconnects use micro fiber grounds that are
higher in resistance but sound much better in
analog applications.

Mr. Grost further elaborated on his theory of
digital cable design. He believes that
vibration from external sources and structural
resonance that occur within the conductive
bundle are at least as important as electrical
considerations. Therefore, each Cerious
Technologies cable employs a reactive liquid
ceramic damping material that actively
responds to both internal and external
vibrations. The synthetic ceramic is
non-conductive and is claimed to have
excellent rejection properties for RFI and EMF.
The ceramic used is unique in that it moves
continually between a solid and liquid state.
When no vibration is present the ceramic is
solid but it liquefies when there is
vibration.

The damping jackets are highly capacitive,
effectively adding a capacitor across the
conductors to filter out high frequency noise.
Cerious Technologies digital cables are
effectively a giant capacitor, linear in value
at any point in the cables. This eliminates
sub-resonance and minimizes reflections at the
connector contact points. This, along with
their physical damping, is what creates the
silent backgrounds.

Performance
Before I get any farther into the performance
review let me briefly describe my system since
it is atypical. There are no analog
crossovers, analog interconnects, or low-level
DACs in my system. I accomplished this by
using TacT Audio all-digital components. The
digital preamp performs not only room
correction but provides the crossover between
the main speakers and the subwoofers. Two of
the digital-input amplifiers are programmed as
crossovers. One powers the woofer panels on my
Apogee Acoustic Mini Grand loudspeakers and
the other powers the midrange/tweeter ribbon.
The third digital-input amplifier powers two
subwoofers. Conversion to an analog signal for
the speakers occurs at the power output phase
of the amplifiers. An all-digital system makes
the perfect format for evaluating digital
interconnects without the masking of analog
interconnects and crossovers found in a
typical configuration. Further, Apogee Mini
Grand loudspeakers are taken to a new level of
dynamics and detail with the active and
passive analog crossovers eliminated.

For this review, I used three Cerious
Technologies digital interconnects. Two were
RCA and one was AES/EBU (balanced). I did not
use Cerious Technologies on the subwoofer
amplifier. In my system I found the Cerious
Technologies cables performed best at the
sampling frequency of 192 kHz.

The generic locking RCA terminations were
typical of other locking connectors I have
used. The RCA connectors hold well and do not
have to be tightened beyond snug. For balanced
terminations, Cerious Technologies uses Xhadow
because they can be terminated with a gas
tight crimp rather than solder. The attractive
and durable exterior of the cables is
translucent white.

Because the pins required proper orientation,
the balanced interconnect was a little
difficult to twist into position. The Cerious
Technologies cables are semi-stiff and do not
twist well. These cables do not have the
familiar feel of wire cables. They have a
pressurized hydraulic hose feel. Think of a
garden hose but with higher water pressure.

The Cerious Technologies digital interconnects
had the strangest break in I have ever
experienced. They were very confused and muddy
at first. They seemed to evolve in an uneven
manner. Middle frequencies developed first,
low bass next, and highs last. Although the
manufacturer claims little break in is
necessary (three days), I found it took two
weeks before all the confusion disappeared and
the sound opened up. The sound continued to
open up during the third week (approximately
300 play hours) and seemed fully developed by
the fourth. I confess that I did not listen
consistently during the first two weeks. I
just left my system run at low volume for
about 12 hours a day. I periodically stuck a
toothpick in the cake and determined that it
was not done yet.